The real problem with MSN Search: localization
Mike Golding recently profiled an article from Sitepoint about how good MSN search was, and how we will “Ignore MSN Search at Our Peril”. I use MSN search sometimes to supplement other searches since I know their methods are different, but I was curious as to why Mike had such bizarre results. The reason: localization.
So taking a closer look at MSN search I realized that my results were completely different from Mike’s when searching for “lotus Notes”, until I realized that Mike was using MSN.co.uk. It seems that the results from MSN.com and MSN.co.uk were drastically different
The fact that IBM’s site is not even on the first page of the MSN-UK site is just plain crazy and very much out of whack since Google’s results are almost duplicates between google.com and google.co.uk.
Looks like MSN has some work to do with respect to their indexing, which is probably why I see numbers like these on my site:
Links from an Internet Search Engine - Google 1415 - MSN 36 - Yahoo 20 - Dogpile 3 - A9.com 1 - Search.com 1